Wednesday, February 27, 2008

One more catch

(This post might only be interesting to people with fairly good Lua proficiency).
Some time ago, I wrote a post about designing a try...catch extension. The point was to show that even seemingly simple extensions require care to many corner cases, if one wants them to work reliably; and the implied consequence was that lower level approaches to meta-programming, akin to source preprocessing, are not suitable to write robust language features.
I unwillingly demonstrated this by leaving an corner case unattended. The extension wraps portions of code that might fail into a "pcall(function()...end)"; this breaks return statements: they would return from the newly created function, not from the surrounding user's function as he would expect. Replacing return statements with something suitable was one of the extension's tasks (and one that would be hard to achieve with a code preprocessor). However, I forgot that "...", the extra arguments of a function call, can't be passed across function boundaries either. If they're used in a pcall+function wrapper, they have to be stored in a temporary table and unpacked when used. Here's the piece of code that has shown the issue:

It uses "with...do...end", which limits the lifetime of a resource (here a file handle) to a lexical scope: the "h" declared in "with h = ... do ... end" will be closed once "end" is reached, even if returns and/or errors happen in the block; of course, it is implemented using the try/catch extension, and expands to:

function run (fmt, ...)
do
local h
try
h = io.popen(string.format(fmt, ...), 'r') do
return h:read '*a'
finally
h:close()
end
end
end

The (repeated) moral of the story is: language extensions are even harder than regular code to make reusable. If your language encourages writing quick and dirty macros, it will have a hard time growing extensive libraries. And if your meta-programming framework hasn't got a deep understanding of the code it manipulates, it's simply pointless.